Afternoon Hailstorm & Sunset

March 11, 2003

The past few days had generally been warm and humid.  There were storms on the border ranges on Sunday, and a little more widespread on Monday (I even had the pleasure of seeing one CG when I was driving home from Toowoomba!)  However today was holding the most promise with the tip of the upper trough overhead and the moist E'ly winds still feeding into a convergence zone on the trough through the Downs.

A bit after 3pm some showers began to develop to my south and I watched them with interest. 

Slowly (the key word here is slowly!) they continued to evolve into thunderstorms.  A cell to my S produced a weak gustfront...and then it produced some nice moist-scud lowerings too!  I need to admit, it got my attention very quickly!  And it was a part of inflow (rising into the storm), but they were perfectly harmless and there was no rotation either.

The guster had a bit of greenage in it - I was hoping for hail due to the cooler upper levels. 

We got a good solid ten minutes of 20-30 knot outflow winds as the storm neared with some nice rumbles of thunder (one very nice CG about 2km away too!)  Eventually it started spitting...only small drops at first, but soon the drops became very large!  Sure enough, some small hail began to fall (only pea size, doesn't show up well on video but you can hear it on the roof!), and not very much - but it was still fun to have!  There were some periods of heavy rain afterwards, but it wasn't persistent, unfortunately the cell was collapsing by the time it moved over us (due to the weak low to mid level shear, but upper shear was very good!)

It was quite cold afterwards (storm dropped the temperature here to 17.9C after a maximum of 31.7C!)  But mother nature had one more gift to give - an awesome sunset to top off the day!